law

law

1. A rule of conduct or procedure established by custom, agreement, or authority.

2.

a. The body of rules and principles governing the affairs of a community and enforced by a political authority; a legal system: international law.

b. The condition of social order and justice created by adherence to such a system: a breakdown of law and civilized behavior.

3. A set of rules or principles dealing with a specific area of a legal system: tax law; criminal law.

4.

a. A statute, ordinance, or other rule enacted by a legislature.

b. A judicially established legal requirement; a precedent.

5.

a. The system of judicial administration giving effect to the laws of a community: All citizens are equal before the law.

b. Legal action or proceedings; litigation: submit a dispute to law.

c. An impromptu or extralegal system of justice substituted for established judicial procedure: frontier law.

6.

a. An agency or agent responsible for enforcing the law. Often used with the: "The law ... stormed out of the woods as the vessel was being relieved of her cargo"(Sid Moody).

b. Informal A police officer. Often used with the.

7.

a. The science and study of law; jurisprudence.

b. Knowledge of law.

c. The profession of an attorney.

8. Something, such as an order or a dictum, having absolute or unquestioned authority: The commander's word was law.

9. Law

a. A body of principles or precepts held to express the divine will, especially as revealed in the Bible.

b. The first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures.

10. A code of principles based on morality, conscience, or nature.

11.

a. A rule or custom generally established in a particular domain: the unwritten laws of good sportsmanship.

b. A way of life: the law of the jungle.

12.

a. A statement describing a relationship observed to be invariable between or among phenomena for all cases in which the specified conditions are met: the law of gravity.

b. A generalization based on consistent experience or results: the law of supply and demand.

13. Mathematics A general principle or rule that is assumed or that has been proven to hold between expressions.

14. A principle of organization, procedure, or technique: the laws of grammar; the laws of visual perspective.

Idioms:

a law unto (oneself)

A totally independent operator: An executive who is a law unto herself.

take the law into (one's) own hands

To mete out justice as one sees fit without due recourse to law enforcement agencies or the courts.

[Middle English, from Old English lagu, from Old Norse *lagu, variant of lag, that which is laid down; see legh- in Indo-European roots.]

law

(lɔː)

n

1. (Law) a rule or set of rules, enforceable by the courts, regulating the government of a state, the relationship between the organs of government and the subjects of the state, and the relationship or conduct of subjects towards each other

law

Law

2. (Biography) Denis. born 1940, Scottish footballer; a striker, he played for Manchester United (1962–73) and Scotland (30 goals in 55 games, 1958–74); European Footballer of the Year (1964)

3. (Biography) John. 1671–1729, Scottish financier. He founded the first bank in France (1716) and the Mississippi Scheme for the development of Louisiana (1717), which collapsed due to excessive speculation

4. (Biography) Jude. born 1972, British film actor, who starred in The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), Cold Mountain (2003), and Sherlock Holmes (2009)

5. (Biography) William. 1686–1761, British Anglican divine, best known for A Serious Call to a Holy and Devout Life (1728)

law

(lɔ) n.

1. the principles and regulations established by a government or other authority and applicable to a people, whether by legislation or by custom enforced by judicial decision.

2. any written or positive rule or collection of rules prescribed under the authority of the state or nation, as by the people in its constitution.

3. a system or collection of such rules.

4. the condition of society brought about by observance of such rules: maintaining law and order.

5. the field of knowledge concerned with these rules; jurisprudence: to study law.

6. the body of such rules concerned with a particular subject: commercial law; tax law.

7. an act of the highest legislative body of a state or nation.

8. the profession that deals with law and legal procedure: to practice law.

9. legal action; litigation: to go to law.

10. an agent or agency that enforces the law, esp. the police: The law arrived to quell the riot.

11. any rule or injunction that must be obeyed.

12. a rule or principle of proper conduct sanctioned by conscience, concepts of natural justice, or the will of a deity: a moral law.

13. a rule or manner of behavior that is instinctive or spontaneous: the law of self-preservation.

14. (in philosophy, science, etc.)

a. a statement of a relation or sequence of phenomena invariable under the same conditions.

b. a mathematical rule.

15. a principle based on the predictable consequences of an act, condition, etc.: the law of supply and demand.

16. a rule, principle, or convention regarded as governing the structure or the relationship of an element in the structure of something, as of a language or work of art: the laws of grammar.

20. the preceptive part of the Bible, esp. of the New Testament, in contradistinction to its promises: the law of Christ.

v.i.

21. to institute legal action; sue.

v.t.

22. Chiefly Dial. to sue or prosecute.

Idioms:

1. be a law to or unto oneself, to act independently or unconventionally, esp. without regard for established mores.

2. lay down the law, to issue orders imperiously.

3. take the law into one's own hands, to administer justice as one sees fit without recourse to legal processes.

[before 1000; Middle English law(e),lagh(e), Old English lagu < Old Norse *lagu, early pl. of lag layer, laying in order]

Law

(lɔ)

n.

John, 1671–1729, Scottish financier.

law

(lô)

A statement that describes what will happen in all cases under a specified set of conditions. Laws describe an invariable relationship among phenomena. Boyle's law, for instance, describes what will happen to the volume of a gas if its pressure changes and its temperature remains the same. See Note at hypothesis.

1. the state or practice of being a squatter, or one who settles on government land, thereby establishing ownership.2. the state or practice of settling in vacant or abandoned property, either for shelter or in an attempt to establish ownership. — squatter, n.

Law

Exact laws, like all the other ultimates and absolutes, are as fabulous as the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end —G. N. Lewis

Going to law is like skinning a new milk cow for the hide, and giving the meat to the lawyers —Josh Billings

The original in Billings’ popular dialect form reads as follows: “Going tew law iz like skinning a new milch … .tew the lawyers.”

Great cases like hard cases make bad law —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Justice Holmes expanded on his simile as follows: “For great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.”

Law is a bottomless pit —John Arbuthnot

Arbuthnot continues as follows: “It is a cormorant, a harpy that devours everything!”

Law is a form of order, and good law must necessarily mean good order —Aristotle

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in your face while it picks your pocket —Charles Macklin

The law is like apparel which alters with the time —Sir John Doddridge

Law is like pregnancy, a little of either being a dangerous thing —Robert Traver

The law often dances like an old fishwife in wooden shoes, with little grace and less dispatch —George Garrett

In Garrett’s historical novel, Death of the Fox, this simile is voiced by Sir Francis Bacon.

Laws and institutions … like clocks, they must be occasionally cleansed, and wound up, and set to true time —Henry Ward Beecher

(Written) laws are like spiders’ webs; they hold the weak and delicate who might be caught in their meshes, but are torn in pieces by the rich and powerful —Anarchis

The spiders’ web comparison to the law has been much used and modified. Here are some examples: “Laws, like cobwebs, entangle the weak, but are broken by the strong;” “Laws are like spiders’ webs, so that the great buzzing bees break through, and the little feeble flies hang fast in them” (Henry Smith); “Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through” (Jonathan Swift); “Laws, like cobwebs, catch small flies, great ones break through before your eyes” (Benjamin Franklin); “Laws, like the spider’s web, catch the fly and let the hawk go free” (Spanish proverb).

Law should be like death, which spares no one —Charles de Secondat Montesquieu

Laws, like houses, lean on one another —Edmund Burke

Laws should be like clothes. They should fit the people they are meant to serve —Clarence Darrow

Violations of the law, like viruses, are present all the time. Everybody does them. Whether or not they produce a disease, or a prosecution, is a function of the body politic —Anon quote, New York Times/Washington Talk, November 28, 1986

law

A rule describing certain natural observable phenomena or the relationship between effects of variable quantities.

novation - (law) the replacement of one obligation by another by mutual agreement of both parties; usually the replacement of one of the original parties to a contract with the consent of the remaining party

subrogation - (law) the act of substituting of one creditor for another

chance-medley - an unpremeditated killing of a human being in self defense

derogation - (law) the partial taking away of the effectiveness of a law; a partial repeal or abolition of a law; "any derogation of the common law is to be strictly construed"

recission, rescission - (law) the act of rescinding; the cancellation of a contract and the return of the parties to the positions they would have had if the contract had not been made; "recission may be brought about by decree or by mutual consent"

comparative negligence - (law) negligence allocated between the plaintiff and the defendant with a corresponding reduction in damages paid to the plaintiff

concurrent negligence - (law) negligence of two of more persons acting independently; the plaintiff may sue both together or separately

contributory negligence - (law) behavior by the plaintiff that contributes to the harm resulting from the defendant's negligence; "in common law any degree of contributory negligence would bar the plaintiff from collecting damages"

criminal negligence, culpable negligence - (law) recklessly acting without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences)

barratry - the offense of vexatiously persisting in inciting lawsuits and quarrels

champerty - an unethical agreement between an attorney and client that the attorney would sue and pay the costs of the client's suit in return for a portion of the damages awarded; "soliciting personal injury cases may constitute champerty"

criminal maintenance, maintenance - the unauthorized interference in a legal action by a person having no interest in it (as by helping one party with money or otherwise to continue the action) so as to obstruct justice or promote unnecessary litigation or unsettle the peace of the community; "unlike champerty, criminal maintenance does not necessarily involve personal profit"

false pretence, false pretense - (law) an offense involving intent to defraud and false representation and obtaining property as a result of that misrepresentation

resisting arrest - physical efforts to oppose a lawful arrest; the resistance is classified as assault and battery upon the person of the police officer attempting to make the arrest

sedition - an illegal action inciting resistance to lawful authority and tending to cause the disruption or overthrow of the government

sex crime, sex offense, sexual abuse, sexual assault - a statutory offense that provides that it is a crime to knowingly cause another person to engage in an unwanted sexual act by force or threat; "most states have replaced the common law definition of rape with statutes defining sexual assault"

kidnapping, snatch - (law) the unlawful act of capturing and carrying away a person against their will and holding them in false imprisonment

constructive possession - (law) having the power and intention to have and control property but without direct control or actual presence upon it

criminal possession - (law) possession for which criminal sanctions are provided because the property may not lawfully be possessed or may not be possessed under certain circumstances

intervention - (law) a proceeding that permits a person to enter into a lawsuit already in progress; admission of person not an original party to the suit so that person can protect some right or interest that is allegedly affected by the proceedings; "the purpose of intervention is to prevent unnecessary duplication of lawsuits"

2.

law - legal document setting forth rules governing a particular kind of activity; "there is a law against kidnapping"

all-or-none law - (neurophysiology) a nerve impulse resulting from a weak stimulus is just as strong as a nerve impulse resulting from a strong stimulus

principle, rule - a rule or law concerning a natural phenomenon or the function of a complex system; "the principle of the conservation of mass"; "the principle of jet propulsion"; "the right-hand rule for inductive fields"

Bernoulli's law, law of large numbers - (statistics) law stating that a large number of items taken at random from a population will (on the average) have the population statistics

Benford's law - a law used by auditors to identify fictitious populations of numbers; applies to any population of numbers derived from other numbers; "Benford's law holds that 30% of the time the first non-zero digit of a derived number will be 1 and it will be 9 only 4.6% of the time"

Bose-Einstein statistics - (physics) statistical law obeyed by a system of particles whose wave function is not changed when two particles are interchanged (the Pauli exclusion principle does not apply)

Coulomb's Law - a fundamental principle of electrostatics; the force of attraction or repulsion between two charged particles is directly proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the distance between them; principle also holds for magnetic poles

Dalton's law of partial pressures, law of partial pressures, Dalton's law - (chemistry and physics) law stating that the pressure exerted by a mixture of gases equals the sum of the partial pressures of the gases in the mixture; the pressure of a gas in a mixture equals the pressure it would exert if it occupied the same volume alone at the same temperature

distribution law - (chemistry) the total energy in an assembly of molecules is not distributed equally but is distributed around an average value according to a statistical distribution

equilibrium law, law of chemical equilibrium - (chemistry) the principle that (at chemical equilibrium) in a reversible reaction the ratio of the rate of the forward reaction to the rate of the reverse reaction is a constant for that reaction

Fechner's law, Weber-Fechner law - (psychophysics) the concept that the magnitude of a subjective sensation increases proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity; based on early work by E. H. Weber

Fermi-Dirac statistics - (physics) law obeyed by a systems of particles whose wave function changes when two particles are interchanged (the Pauli exclusion principle applies)

Kirchhoff's laws - (physics) two laws governing electric networks in which steady currents flow: the sum of all the currents at a point is zero and the sum of the voltage gains and drops around any closed circuit is zero

law of averages - a law affirming that in the long run probabilities will determine performance

law of diminishing returns - a law affirming that to continue after a certain level of performance has been reached will result in a decline in effectiveness

law of effect - (psychology) the principle that behaviors are selected by their consequences; behavior having good consequences tends to be repeated whereas behavior that leads to bad consequences is not repeated

law of gravitation, Newton's law of gravitation - (physics) the law that states any two bodies attract each other with a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them

5.

law - the branch of philosophy concerned with the law and the principles that lead courts to make the decisions they do

Quotations"The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom" [John Locke Second Treatise of Civil Government]"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important" [Martin Luther King Jr]"The law is a causeway upon which so long as he keeps to it a citizen may walk safely" [Robert Bolt A Man For All Seasons]"No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails" [John Mortimer A Voyage Round My Father]"Laws were made to be broken" [John Wilson Noctes Ambrosianae]"The Common Law of England has been laboriously built about a mythical figure - the figure of "The Reasonable Man"" [A.P. Herbert Uncommon Law]"We do not get good laws to restrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws" [G.K. Chesterton All Things Considered]"The law is a ass - a idiot" [Charles Dickens Oliver Twist]"Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful" [Anacharsis]"Law is a bottomless pit" [Dr. Arbuthnot The History of John Bull]"The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself" [Charles Dickens Bleak House]"The laws of most countries are far worse than the people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain laws by being seldom or never carried into effect" [John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women]

Proverbs"Hard cases make bad laws""One law for the rich, and another for the poor"

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